Entries tagged storage

So the site http://megaupload.com/ has been taken offline, amidst allegations of knowingly conducting in piracy.

There are probably a lot of legitimate users who have lost access to their uploaded files, even if they were offsite backups you can imagine a user owning a website which now has a million dead-links.

This reminds me of a conversation I overheard on Jon Dowlands blog - the summary is that he'd written a (useful) tool to extract attachments from Maildir folders and was wondering how to store and access those attachments. The upshot seemed to be magical URLs of the form:

The comments covered an alternative which was hash:///sha1/xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, which then becomes close to the magnet:// schema.

I've not yet thought things through, but I can't help thinking that with the redundency already present in the internet we should be looking at non-server-specific links. Yes there are times right now when you might want to address a specific file on a specific server - but otherwise? Wouldn't it be nice if you could just access a file from "anywhere" which happened to have the right contents?

To make this more complete what we need is something that crawls the internet to find files by hash; then add support in browsers. Obviously this must be async and could introduce timing issues, but fundamentally it seems like a reasonable approach to the problem of a single host going offline.

(Consider what happens if imgur.com disappears. All those links would die, yet 99% of the images would still be available somewhere.)

I'm tempted to suggest microformat format but I need to consider the matter. Right now I'm going to immediately update my current image hosts to use, at the very least: